Great beauty is a disfigurement: freakish as microcephalia. No, even worse than that: I mean, who’d be jealous of a tiny-headed broad? The beautiful are isolate: unfingerable: fetus-in-a-bottle geeks. And the well-endowed Miss Nov.-Dec.-Jan. isn’t just another pretty face, she’s training to be a dental hygienist. She certainly makes our mouth water. Pizzle on that: you’ll never find Miss Month between your middle-class teeth. And you—with the receding hairline and that CETA job—would you dare ask her for a date? She’s not constitutional: created more equal than us. I want someone to love me for myself she’d say. But what is self? What would Cheryl Tiegs be if she walked like a walrus on shore leave? She’d be self-different: lots. Beauty (also talent, cash, fame, other crippling accidental traits) tends to domineer, be time-and image-consumptive. The full self is arrested in Bobby Fischer eccentricity: a David Levine exaggeration. They’re insecure, lonesome: wall-flowered by popularity: for God’s sake play chess, sign a check, stride down the runway again. I know loveliness is only skin deep: on the other hand flayed people aren’t too attractive either. So fling up prayers, 1928 style, for those who are sick in mind, body, and estate—and for those who, Lord save them, are knock-outs on the Gorgeous Scale.
Which-all Norman Kotker has done. In a novel of impeccable comic grace: a novel you could invite to dinner with the boss. Comic, but not once snide-satirical: a temptation surely, given the stench of burnt D cups enfogging Miss America in 1978. And from the fifty possible entrants he chose Yvonne Doucette: a character so sweet, cranky, vulnerable, confused, intelligent, and human that I’d let Kotker write my next blind date. Yvonne of Rhode Island. You get the tonal whimsy right off: yes, there can be loveliness, passion, heightened experience even in a place of such inconsequential size that, I think, all its highways must be interstate.
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